Wagner Society Lecture

At its first meeting for 2015, the NSW Wagner Society presents Dr Rosamund Bartlett, author of Wagner and Russia, lecturing on the topic:

Wagner in Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1841-1941: A Century of Reaction and Revolution.

The lecture will be followed by afternoon tea.

Dr Rosamund Bartlett is a writer, scholar, translator and lecturer. She has lectured on Russian literature, music and cultural history at universities and public institutions around the world, and has a particular interest in the comparative history of European Modernism, opera, and the intersection between politics, history and the arts. She is a popular presenter at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Felia Litvinne, the leading Russian Brünnhilde.

Her Oxford doctoral thesis was published as Wagner and Russia by Cambridge University Press in 1995. She is also the editor of Shostakovich in Context, the co-editor of Victory over the Sun: The World’s First Futurist Opera, and has written numerous articles and programme notes on Russian music and opera, including for the Grove Encyclopaedia and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. She has also written acclaimed biographies of Chekhov and Tolstoy and translated their prose. Her new translation of Anna Karenina has just been published.

Join Dr Rosamund Bartlett for this illustrated talk, which will consider such leading and diverse artists as Tchaikovsky, Diaghilev, Meyerhold and Eisenstein in connection with Wagner, and include historic recordings from early Russian Wagner productions.

All welcome: $20 members and $25 guests.

The talk will be preceded at 12.30 pm by a DVD screening of the finals of the Elizabeth Connell Prize competition 2014.